nikki

I’m not saying it implies that. I’m saying that trans people and established research both say that. Your minimal experience with one of the detrans subreddits is not more substantial of a source than first hand accounts and peer reviewed papers.

Did you spend substantial time in /r/detrans and /r/actualdetrans? Were you aware of drama around when that split happened? Discussed it in the other trans communities on the sites? Because right now, your comments make it seem like you’re a passerby who has popped into a trans community and tried to say that your interactions with one community known for astroturfing are more meaningful than decades of research.

I’m sorry, but if you think that there aren’t huge portions of the trans population who have no support system, then it doesn’t really feel possible to have a meaningful discussion about this with you.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8213007/

Here’s one of the more recent meta analysis papers on it. When people who detransition are asked, the majority of the cite external factors like the ones here.

It’s not even people being offended that creates the rules a lot of the time. If you don’t have strict and clear cut rules, it’s going to eat up a ton of mod time trying to keep out trolls and people asking the same things repeatedly in bad faith. I liked the split that was on Reddit between an asktransgender group and the groups meant for community.

For me though, I’ve just never wanted to be in that particular kind of place as a trans person. It takes a lot of energy to constantly answer the unintentionally offensive and invasive questions from all the people in your family, job, and just general day to day life. It’s hard to find people who consistently can and want to give time to helping slowly warm people up to the same basic facts that they could find on their own.

Part of the issue it seems like people are having in this thread is that it’s really unclear what you mean by nonpolitical help.

I’ve never experienced any communities calling gender dysphoria beautiful, but I also see that idea as distinct from acknowledging it as a real problem that affects people. I don’t think it’s in any way political to talk about the fact that gender affirming care is well supported by medical research.

NK Jemison is a great new scifi author who always includes a trans character in her stories in really natural ways. Not sure they’ll be what you’re looking for, but they’re also incredibly good books.

Go fiddle with the calculator on the website I linked to see how injecgion time changes peak-trough gap in the hormone curves. But generally I want stable levels because research shows we need a minimum amount of estrogen in order to have feminizing effects. We don’t want to overshoot it because your body will create SHBG at too high of levels. I’ve never seen any research that hints at varying levels be more effective.

For me personally, I got mood swings right before my next dose until I changed the frequency because my levels would drop. But in general, the goal with feminizing hrt is to change your hormone profile to something approximating that of a cis woman in order to get the changes you want. With a long enough gap between doses, the short half life of EV means that you’ll have very low levels of estrogen right before your next injection, below your goal range.

It’s also important to note when in your injection cycle you tested. I’m mostly interested in what my trough values will be (so immediately prior to the next injection), since that’s the best approximation of steady state tissue levels. Especially on a two week injection cycle of EV, I’d be worried about my levels dipping quite low by the end of the cycle.

I really don’t know why some of the more conservative dosing recommendations still give two week dosing schedules for EV. It has a lower half life than cypionate and should be injected more often, assuming you’re aiming for stable levels (most people are). A lot of our original recommendations for transfem people were based around studies for populations with prostate cancer and menopause, and it seems like dosing strategies for them have stuck around.

I personally wouldnt ever go over a week long dosing of ev, and would likely switch to twice weekly injections if were I on it. The people over at transfemscience.org put together a neat way to visualize the difference in esters for achieving a steady state dose based on the pharmacokinetics of them all. Basically, at this point if I get a recommendation from a doctor for 14 day dosing of EV, I’m going to assume they’re not up to date on current feminizing hrt research and are likely going to also be giving old information about things like IM vs SubQ injections.

Finally, nobody should ever be paywalled from medical information (and it’s pretty abhorrent that this research even has to have hoops to jump around to get through). Just as an fyi for anybody else reading this, most articles that aren’t brand newwill have a copy of it you can access by its doi number on sci-hub.ru (or another mirrored domain, searching scihub normally gives a list of current working addresses). In the case where it isn’t available yet, the journal should provide a way to email them asking for specific articles for patient access.

In general, body hair will reduce slightly on hrt. It’s still there, but in particular I saw a lot less growth for chest hair. If laser works for your skin/hair color combos at a practioner near you, I found it very effective and tolerable. Otherwise I use a safety razor for everything else. Once you’re good with it, it’s a very close and low irritation save.

For facial hair, almost everybody will see no effect with hrt. New growth (as in fully new follicles) should stop, but any existing hair will need to be removed if you want a smooth face all the time. I did laser for some initial clearing and now am doing electrolysis to finish up.

A note for everyone who is interested in injections but doesn’t like IM, you can also do subcutaneous injections. My understanding is that estradiol in common preparations is a depot injection where absorption is controlled less by physical factors and more from the lipophilicity of the medicine itself.

Anybody who’s interested can look for the article “Comparison of the Subcutaneous and Intramuscular Estradiol Regimens as Part of Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy” published out of Dr. nippoldts group at Mayo recently.

If it turns out that running isn’t your thing, I’d recommend trying some sports. Climbing is basically the only exercise that doesn’t bore me to death. Plus, they’re a great way to meet people, and a lot of cities have a queer specific league.

Probably not something you can affect, but my biggest issue with trans care is just access to it through insurance. Free clinics and out of pocket payments make it doable, but around me, the offices specializing in trans care don’t cover insurances except the few largest.

I’m also interested in this for using stremio from phones and PCs. Chromecast in particular also kinda sucks due to limited codec support.

Yeah same, except it was later overturned where I live and they came right back. Luckily, at lesser numbers, because more of us were used to bringing our own by then.

The majority of my friends leaving Austin have done so because of state politics. It’s hard to feel safe when you’re queer in Texas.

Just wanted to add that event digitizing older records these days is better. Some hospitals do make old scanned notes indexed and searchable through OCR now.

Obviously everyone else is right when they say that clearly this isn’t your fault, and add the most of the visual feminization comes from fat distribution, so it’s going to need to be there anyway.

I also want to mention that changes only really happen once your hormone levels get to where they should be. For some people, it takes a while to work with their doctor to get T suppressed and E elevated enough to start seeing changes. Just keep up with your labs and don’t be afraid to talk with your doctor about hormone levels that aren’t where you think they should be.

The fun part of transitioning is that you’ll get both traditional misogyny and new, unique flavors!

Seriously though, joining a group of people that you aren’t used to being in will always feel weird, but luckily that goes away with familiarity. I feel like my advice is always the same though, which is to find a therapist informed on gender issues if you can afford one.